http://socialhistory.org/en/events/radical-sexual-politics
By Judy Greenway
By reaching for the moon, it is said, we learn to reach.
Utopianism, or ‘social dreaming’, is the education of desire for a better
world, and therefore a necessary part of any movement for social change.[i] In this paper I use examples from my research
on anarchism, gender and sexuality in Britain from the 1880s
onwards, to discuss changing concepts of free love and the relationship between
sexual freedom and social transformation, especially for women.
All varieties of anarchism have
in common a rejection of the state, its laws and institutions, including
marriage. The concept of ‘free love' is not static, however, but historically
situated. In the late nineteenth century, hostile commentators linked sexual to
political danger. Amidst widespread public discussion of marriage, anarchists
had to take a position, and anarchist women placed the debate within a feminist
framework. Many saw free love as central
to a critique of capitalism and patriarchy, the basis of a wider struggle
around such issues as sex education, contraception, and women's economic and
social independence.
How was free love
conceptualised? There was no single
model, but the starting point was the legal and social subjugation of women in
marriage, seen as destructive for both women and men.
In 1885 the anarchist Charlotte Wilson
wrote: ‘In
the relations between men and women ... I cry for freedom as the first step - and after freedom, knowledge,
that each may decide...how that freedom can be used.’ She says parenthood and marriage are separate issues, that motherhood
should be chosen, and in a free society many women would not make that choice.
Children
apart, it is an intolerable impertinence that Church or State or society in any
official form should venture to interfere with lovers. If we were not
accustomed to such a thing it would appear unutterably disgusting…[1]
[H]ave you not noticed that men
and women of the New Society which is struggling into being within the old,
naturally fall into healthy relations of cordial equality without very much
theorising?[2]
Soon after, Wilson became editor and
publisher of the anarchist newspaper Freedom, and although the paper
concentrated on economic and political matters, it was also a public space to
discuss sex and marriage. Her critique of ‘the existing hypocritical and
unnatural sexual relations’ (marriage) becomes more extreme. Not only is state
interference ‘disgusting’, marriage itself is unnatural and unhealthy, contaminating
all relations between men and women. Free love is part of a wider conception of
a healthy, natural social world.[3]
In 1888, a national newspaper
launched the so-called ‘marriage controversy’. ‘Is marriage a failure?’ read
the billboards. [4] In a front page editorial in Freedom,
Charlotte Wilson asked: ‘If the kernel [of society, marriage is] suspected of
being unsound, what of the whole nut?’
Although recent legal and social changes made some degree of economic
independence possible for women, she argues that to become wage slaves rather
than chattel slaves in marriage is little improvement, especially for mothers.
Women who are awake
to a consciousness of their human dignity have everything to gain because they
have nothing to lose, by a Social Revolution.
It is possible to conceive a tolerably intelligent man advocating
palliative measures and gradual reform; but a woman who is not a Revolutionist
is a fool.[5]
This recognition of the different
perspectives of men and women is developed a few years later by another woman
writer, Aphra Wilson. New woman, she argued, wants a new man: ‘She will not put
a foot into Bondwoman's Lane ... She shall take to herself a mate; with her
shall lie the choice in childbearing.’ Happily, lovingly, they will travel together
on ‘the Open Road… of perfect freedom - the heroic path of a divine Liberty.’ But new men are
hard to find, and the enemies of liberty are the Licentious Male, the Priest,
and the Man of Science.[6] It was clear to her and other 1890s ‘New
Women’ that they would have to seek liberation their own way, on their own
terms. Their emphasis was not just on freedom from marriage and bondage, but on
the positive virtues of choice, and the conditions in which love can flourish.
The public debate continued throughout
that decade.[7]
It was widely thought that free love was an excuse for promiscuity and the
degradation of women. To its enemies, sexual freedom would lead to political
and social chaos, the destruction of all order – anarchy. Anarchists, on the
other hand, argued that anarchism heralded a New Order in sexual and social
relations, and that chaos, disorder and immorality lay in the capitalist system
and the patriarchal family.[8]
Anarchists disagreed about
homosexuality. Although in theory the call for free love opened up a space to
discuss same-sex love, in practice, at least in public, this happened only
occasionally. At the time of the Oscar
Wilde trials, Freedom ran an editorial condemning the hypocrisy of his
persecutors, and an article by gay anarchist Edward Carpenter, defending
same-sex love. Suggesting a more inclusive definition of free love, he argued
that ‘there can be no truly moral relations between people unless they are
free.’[9]
Emma Goldman, then living in the USA, also publicly
attacked the persecution of Wilde.[10] She was one of several notorious anarchist
women who visited Britain in the 1890s,
preaching free love to large audiences. Goldman argued that women should free
themselves from internal as well as external tyrants, in order to express their
true natures as women and as mothers.[11]
Another visitor, Voltairine de
Cleyre, drew on her own bitter experience to advise women against living with
their lovers, as they would become mere housekeepers.
Men may not mean to
be tyrants when they marry, but they frequently grow to be such. It is insufficient to dispense with the
priest or the registrar. The spirit of
marriage makes for slavery.[12]
Utopianism often works by reversals which challenge what is taken for granted, and show existing society to be dystopian. This process can be seen in all these speeches and writings:
·
patriarchal capitalism is chaotic and disordered; anarchism
is the rational new order
·
marriage constrains nature; free love is natural love
·
marriage is immoral; free love moral
·
unfree sex and motherhood is disgusting; love in freedom is
beautiful
By the end of the century women
were using their own experiences as a central part of their arguments, moving
the free love debates on by discussing psychological power relations, and
asserting the need for a free and natural sexuality which might not be confined
to one relationship.
Here it may be useful to bring in queer theory, and the
claim, derived from the concept of speech acts, that identity is created
through performance. The paradigm case of a speech act is to say ‘I do’ in the
marriage ceremony - saying the words is
the act of assenting to marriage. Perhaps saying ‘I don’t’ to marriage, can
similarly be a speech act, the creation of a dissident, utopian self. In the late
nineteenth century, for women to write or speak in public about their own sexual lives, desires and feelings,
was still scandalous, as it was to speak publicly as anarchists. In speaking
out, these women were in effect performing desire, enacting anarchist feminism,
doing utopia.
The impact of these ideas on a
younger generation can be seen in the life of Rose Witcop. Best known as a
birth control activist, Witcop grew up at the turn of the century in London’s East End Jewish immigrant
community, with its flourishing anarchist movement. When in 1907, aged sixteen,
she began a relationship with twenty year old Guy Aldred, she gave him
pamphlets on free love and birth control, and spoke at length to him about her
role model, free love propagandist Victoria Woodhull.[13]
Biography and autobiography, then and later, could be as influential as theory
for those seeking new ways to live their politics.
Both Witcop and Aldred were firm believers in sexual
equality and staunch propagandists for free love. For many (though not all)
anarchist women at this time, it was an integral part of a transformed society,
though it was not a popular cause in the wider pre-war feminist movement. In
1912, in the anarchist feminist journal The Freewoman, Witcop wrote a
sarcastic retort to a correspondent self-identified as a happily married woman:
There is a distinction between the
terms lust, licence, prostitution and free love... freewomen are not led by
men, nor wish to lead men...we who advocate free relationships between the sexes
have no designs whatever on your particular husband...we desire merely to see
him a free man and you a free woman.
She advises the wife to broaden her horizons beyond married
domesticity.[14]
The social changes brought about by the First World War gave
a very different context to the debates, as we can see in the life of Ethel
Mannin. Anarchist, pacifist and popular novelist, she was a prominent figure in
the bohemian milieu of 1920s London. By her own account,
her ideas were influenced by Freud, H.G.Wells, and D.H. Lawrence, among others,
and her belief in free love developed in the context of widespread postwar
hedonism, the developing sex reform movement, the belief in female independence
and equality which was the legacy of the women’s suffrage movement, and not
least the availability of effective birth control (for the lucky few who knew
how where to get it.) However, Mannin distinguishes between defying social
convention for personal reasons, and doing so on principle as a deliberate and
politicised transgression, part of an attempt to change society. For her, free
love is not just what you do, but why and how you do it. Consciously setting
herself up as a role model, she is part of that utopian tradition which seeks
to exemplify or rehearse the possibilities of a better world not just in
fiction but in the practices of life.
In the1920s, she was part of a social and intellectual
milieu that set itself against what it characterised as bourgeois
puritanism. In the early forties, in Commonsense
and Morality, she drew on psychoanalysis to oppose reason and commonsense
to superstition and irrationality.[15] In the
late 1960s, in Practitioners of Love, she contrasts the ‘erotic seizure’
of lust with the ‘intense affirmation’ of true love, and commends the ‘Permissive
Society’.[16]
‘All you need is love’, sang the Beatles in 1967. ‘Take your
desires for reality’, went the situationist slogan in 1968. But what love,
whose desires, which reality? What connections were being made in the late
1960s and early 1970s between sex, love, and social change?
1967 was dubbed ‘the summer of love’, and in chilly England we read about
‘love-ins’ in California parks. The fantasy
was about beautiful young people making love in the sunshine with flowers in
their hair. Sexual hedonism - but with a
political angle. ‘Make love not war’, for example. What did this mean, exactly?
If war is a keystone of an unjust world, sex is a keystone of a transformed
world: sex as pleasure; sex as rebellion; sex as solidarity.
To understand what sexual liberation meant in 1968 and
after, we need to understand what it was seen as liberation from, especially
for the immediate post-war generation to whom adulthood still meant marriage,
domesticity, social conformity. Sex, for young people, but especially for
women, was associated with anxiety; for heterosexual women the fear of unwanted
pregnancy. Lesbianism was invisible and sex between men was illegal. The
sixties saw a rapid liberalisation of social attitudes as well as legal
reforms, particularly the partial decriminalisation of male homosexual activity
and of abortion, which seemed to affirm the importance of bodily autonomy and
personal liberty.
Sex reform was associated with social change in the sense of
inevitable liberal progress. Sexual freedom was about throwing off repression,
in the name of post-war modernity, scientific enlightenment, consumerism,
pleasure, abundance. For the young in particular, sexual freedom was part of a
culture of rebellion, a rejection of ‘bourgeois values’ Amongst sexual
radicals, sexual repression was seen as a way in which power is maintained,
sexual liberation as a means to freedom.
In 1968 and after the Situationists linked love, sex and
revolution:
The more l make love the more I feel like making
revolution; the more l make revolution the more l feel like making love.[17]
For them,
sex is a motivating force, sexual love is subversive, anti-authoritarian.[ii] They attacked ‘a rampant
sexual nihilism’, where ‘all pleasure is absent - the freedom which modern
capitalism affords everyone is the freedom to meet, fuck, and remain as an object…the search for authentic life and
communication which … lies at the root of all sexual experience will only be
satisfied through the transformation of
all social relations.’ [18] Like Reich
and Marcuse, whose works were often referred to, if not always read,
Situationists contrasted false with revolutionary sexuality, and argued that a twentieth century revolution required
a new kind of person, new kinds of relationships, a new morality. We must find
our true selves - or make new selves: ideas which may be logically
incompatible, but in practice often coincided.
While the Situationists argued that sexual freedom was just
another aspect of consumer capitalism, gay and women’s liberationists began to
challenge male domination and heterosexism. Both movements produced new
critiques of marriage and the family. Patriarchy was alive and well within the
sexual revolution, and sexual politics was about challenging male power at all
levels. How did free love or sexual liberation fit into this?
By this time, so-called pre-marital sex was becoming pretty
much taken for granted in mainstream society, and gay relationships were
becoming more visible. Serial monogamy was, as now, seen as a natural way of
organising sexual relationships.
Non-monogamy was trickier. Some anarchist women felt that this was not
liberty but male licence, with liberated women being expected to say yes to sex
with anyone. For them, as for other feminists, the ‘free love’ of the sixties
was another imposition of male-defined sexuality.
But the stories of experimenters like Ethel Mannin and Emma
Goldman suggested that there were other possibilities, that women could be free
and independent and set their own terms. In her best selling memoirs Confessions
and Impressions, Mannin had asserted the supreme value of passion,
especially sexual passion.
At the back of all our shame
about sex is the puritanical hatred of life, and its fear of happiness.....
[E]very women of courage and
intelligence has had numerous lovers...it is the attitude to life that
counts…not the number of affaires,
but the amount of living. [19].
In the 1930’s she met the love of her life, Reginald
Reynolds. They lived separately in what they called a ‘semi-detached marriage’,
both having other sexual relationships. Her memoirs conclude with a
reaffirmation of belief in sexual and emotional fulfilment, a denunciation of
puritanism and hypocrisy. ‘Our need is for a new social order, a new religion -
a religion not of God, but of Man; not of fear but of freedom, not of Heaven,
but of Earth.’[20]
Emma Goldman, whose autobiography Living my Life was
reprinted in 1970, valorised love, asserted that it must be free, and that
sexual passion is natural and central to a fulfilled life. She tells a story of
multiple sexual relationships integrated into a life of revolutionary activity. [21] Such
autobiographies made such lives seem both admirable and achievable. (Only later
did we find out what was being left out of these accounts - in particular the
intransigence of jealousy.)
In our attempts to discuss the politics of the personal, and
to experiment in our own lives, such narratives were centrally important, and
the burgeoning women’s liberation movement, with its emphasis on consciousness-raising,
meant that the relationship of theory to practice became an exhilarating topic
of discussion.
Free love was all very well – but what was love? For a while, a radical deconstruction of
romantic love became popular. It was not something in ourselves needing to be
liberated, but was constructed by bourgeois capitalist society to perpetuate
the nuclear family. One poster of the period read: ‘It begins when you sink in
his arms, it ends with your arms in the sink’.
In The Politics of Sexuality in Capitalism, the Red
Collective, a group of heterosexual revolutionaries, situate love and sexual
desire in a social and political framework. The distinction between private
life and public politics must be challenged, and we must share and analyse our
internalised feelings, so that we can change our lives. Once the old patterns
are deconstructed we will be able to make life less oppressive to women in
particular, and more fulfilling for everyone Jealousy is not a natural and
inevitable obstacle to living differently; it is the product of the power
relations within a specific society. Putting theory into practice, they analyse
their own difficulties with non-monogamous heterosexual relationships.[22]
And now? Post-feminism, post-AIDS, with the renewed
popularity of a modernised biological determinism, such ideas are too easily
seen as naive. On the other hand, if sexual freedom is always defined in
relation to existing conditions, what can it mean in societies where there is
widespread acceptance of the importance of sexuality and its free expression?
‘Our bodies ourselves’ was the slogan of the women’s health
movement, an argument for the right to abortion, to sex without fear. Now it
seems our bodies are our possessions to modify, trade or dispose of as we wish;
free love has become free trade; sexual liberation become sexual
neo-liberalism. The focus on representation means that pornography can be seen
as seen as pleasure for its consumers, regardless of its conditions of
production. Porn stars and highly paid prostitutes (the others tend to be
invisible in this argument) are seen as exercising their sexual powers in a
free market. Freedom here is individual, not social. Free choice is freedom for
individuals to sell and consume. Globalisation opens up the world for sexual
tourism and sexual trafficking, while the new world economy creates the
conditions where prostitution is for many a preferable option to sweatshops or
starvation.
Audre Lorde, the African-American lesbian feminist, said
that what matters:
is not who I sleep with…nor what
we do together… but what life statements I am led to make as the nature and
effect of my erotic relationships percolate throughout my life and being
...[H]ow does our sexuality enrich us and empower our actions?’[23]
If in the sixties free love needed to be about the
importance of sex, and in the seventies about challenging love and the family
as sites of sexual oppression, perhaps now it needs to be about reclaiming love
from sentimentality and sex from simple hedonism, and reasserting a connection
between the individual and the social. We need to be thinking about sex and
solidarity; the relationship between passion and intimacy, commitment and
friendship.
Studies of lesbian and gay friendship networks and ‘families
of choice’ suggest new approaches.[24] Love,
passion, commitment, monogamy – all
these require explicit negotiation and have different meanings once we step
outside socially legitimated structures of relationships. In the words of a
seventies poster, together we can make a new world.
If sex is
to be more than pleasure, a consolation in hard times, it is because it can
make us question the conditions in which free love might be possible. Sex is
not a solution, but as Linda Grant says:
Perhaps sex is just the ghost of
freedom but until we have utopia, it can speak eloquently what the heart
desires..[25]
Free love
is not simply what people do in (or out of) bed, nor is it just one aspect of
anarchist or libertarian theory. It is to speak publicly about what the heart
desires; to try and work out, in our own lives, how a better world might be
possible.
[i] For utopianism as
social dreaming, see Lyman Tower
Sargent, 1994, ‘The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited’, in Utopian
Studies, 5:1, pp.1-37; as the education of desire, see Ruth Levitas,
1996, The Concept of Utopia,
Phillip Allan, London.
[ii] ‘In love - in all love
there resides an outlaw principle, an irresistible sense of delinquency,
contempt for prohibitions and a taste of havoc’, Anon, February 15, 2003, Disobedience against War.
This quote, from an anarchist paper on sale at an anti-war demonstration
in London earlier
this year, comes,
I believe, from early seventies Situationism. I have so far been unable to
identify it.
[4] Lucy Bland,
1995, Banishing the Beast, English
Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885-1914, Penguin, Harmondsworth.
[7] See, e.g.,
Bland,1995, op cit., especially Chapter 4; Bland, 1986, ‘Marriage Laid Bare:
Middle Class Women and Marital Sex’, in Jane Lewis (ed.), 1986, Labour and
Love, Blackwell, Oxford.
[8] LSB [Louise
Bevington], 1893, ‘Wanted: Order’, in Commonweal, 1:2 NS, May 1893.
[9] Freedom, 11:94, June 1895; Edward
Carpenter, 1895,‘Some Recent Criminal Cases’, Freedom, 9:95, July 1895.
[10] See Jonathan Katz,
1976, Gay American History, Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, and Jim Kernochan,
1978, ‘Emma Goldman: Morning Star of Sexual Anarchy’, in The Storm,
No.6, 1978.
[11] See Emma Goldman, (1910), 1970, ‘The Tragedy
of Women's Emancipation’, and ‘Marriage and Love’, in Goldman, 1970, Love
Among The Free, Friends of Malatesta, Buffalo. (Although of a
later date, these essays draw on talks she had been giving over the years, and
correspond with reports of her talks in Britain.)
[12] The Adult,
1:6, Jan. 1898, report of Voltairine de Cleyre's talk on 'The Woman Question'
at the Labour Church in Bradford.
[13] Guy Aldred, 1958, No
Traitor's Gait!, Strickland Press, Glasgow.
[17] Anon, 1973, ‘About sexual misery’,
École du Mai, France, trans. Hester and Marianne Velmans, in Steef Davidson,
(ed.), 1982, The Penguin Book of Political Comics, Penguin,
Harmondsworth, p.148.
[18] Point-Blank!, 1972,
‘Of Sexual Poverty’, in Point-Blank! - contributions towards a situationist
revolution, Point-Blank!, Berkeley, p.68.
[20] ibid p. 111.
[22] Red Collective, nd.,
The Politics of Sexuality in Capitalism: Red Collective Pamphlet 1; The
Politics of Sexuality in Capitalism, Part Two, Red Collective, London.
[23] Audre Lorde,
1988,‘Sadomasochism: Not About Condemnation’, in A Burst of Light: essays by
Audre Lorde, Sheba, London, p.18.
[24] See Jeffrey Weeks,
Brian Heaphy, and Catherine Donovan, 2001, Same Sex Intimacies: Families Of
Choice And Other Experiments, Routledge, London.
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